Monday, January 6, 2014

What is "Science" and "Scientific Method"?

What is “Science”?
Apart from its general definition, which means “knowledge” or “to know,” this is what science is:

“science:noun
a collection of the general principles or leading truths relating to any subject. Pure science, as mathematics, is built on self-evident truths; but the term science is also applied to other subjects founded on...experiment and observation”

–American Dictionary of the English Language

“science:noun
a branch of knowledge conducted on objective principles involving the systematized observation of and experiments with phenomena, esp. concerned with the material and functions of the physical universe”

–The Canadian Oxford Dictionary

“science:noun
knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws esp. as obtained and tested through scientific method”

–Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary

“science:noun
the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment”

–Google

“Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. In an older and closely related meaning, “science” also refers to a body of knowledge itself, of the type that can be rationally explained and reliably applied.”

–Wikipedia

What is “Scientific Method”?

“scientific method: noun
a method of procedure consisting of systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.”

–The Canadian Oxford Dictionary

“scientific method: noun
principles and procedures for the systematic pursuit of knowledge involving the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.”

–Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary

“The scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning.”

–Wikipedia

True and genuine science consists of the use of the scientific method, which is:

Modifying the original hypothesis for further testing (the result of which will eventually and inevitably be a final conclusion [you can only modify your hypothesis so many times before you are merely prolonging the inevitable; eventually you need to accept the truth and draw a conclusion based on all the observations]), or

Drawing a conclusion one way or the other based on the observations, which results in scientific facts (e.g.; H2O is a scientific fact; it cannot and does not change. H3O or H2O2 would no longer be water.).

If you cannot apply all of these, it is not science! If you cannot test it or observe it, it is not science! It is conjecture, it is speculation, it is imagination, it is inference, it is theory, but it is not science! If the scientific method cannot be “reliably applied” and “rationally explained” with adequate “reasoning,” it is not science! (e.g.; The cross-section of Earth ends at the hypothesis. The rest of the scientific method has been deliberately ignored. Ergo, it is not a scientific fact. It holds no science whatsoever.) Here are some quotes to back me and the above definitions:

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." ―Galileo Galilei

"Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory―let the theory go." ―Agatha Christie

"When the scientific method came into being, it gave us a new window
on the truth; namely, a method by laboratory-controlled experiments to
winnow true hypotheses from false ones." ―Huston Smith

"Look ... first and foremost, I'm a scientist. That means it's my
responsibility to make observations and gather evidence before forming a
hypothesis, not vice versa." ―Allen Steele

"Any chemist reading this book can see, in some detail, how I have
spent most of my mature life. They can become familiar with the quality
of my mind and imagination. They can make judgements about my research
abilities. They can tell how well I have documented my claims of
experimental results. Any scientist can redo my experiments to see if
they still work—and this has happened! I know of no other field in which
contributions to world culture are so clearly on exhibit, so
cumulative, and so subject to verification." —Donald J. Cram

"The TV scientist who mutters sadly, "The experiment is a failure; we
have failed to achieve what we had hoped for," is suffering mainly from
a bad script writer. An experiment is never a failure solely because it
fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only
when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when
the data it produces don't prove anything one way or another." ―Robert
M. Pirsig

"Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which
it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth."
―Jules Verne

"Scientists are human—they're as biased as any other group. But they
do have one great advantage in that science is a self-correcting
process." ―Cyril Ponnamperuma

"The method of science is tried and true. It is not perfect, it's
just the best we have. And to abandon it, with its skeptical protocols,
is the pathway to a dark age." ―Carl Sagan

"We must trust to nothing but facts: These are presented to us by
Nature, and cannot deceive. We ought, in every instance, to submit our
reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but
by the natural road of experiment and observation." ―Antoine Lavoisier

Your average proponent of evolution, being ignorant and never having graduated with a degree from any field of science (but merely believing all the lies and nonsense they are fed through various unscientific books), likes to attempt to argue using "consensus." They try and claim that all scientists are agreed on the subject of evolution, which is a fallacious lie! They should pay attention to the following:

"I
want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise
of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science
as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in
its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first
refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the
matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists
agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're
being had.
Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing
whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics.
Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to
be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by
reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is
relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history
are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
There
is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't
science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period." ―Michael Crichton

"I
would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked.
Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid
enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2.
Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It
would never occur to anyone to speak that way." ―Michael Crichton

The following words should be meditated upon deeply because their truth will help an individual to recognize the false from the true. One could also say, "If the Bible doesn't stand up to experimentation, it must be rejected." Anyone who has honestly allowed the Bible to speak for itself and compared it with science, archaeology, and history has found it to be a reliable and trustworthy book. The only reason people do not like it and do not want to accept it, is not because it is not true (because the evidence informs us that it is), but because of the demands it places upon us to repent and trust in the Saviour, Christ Jesus. We are too stubborn and proud and do not want to submit to an authority Who is higher than we are.

"We
must conduct research and then accept the results. If they don't stand
up to experimentation, Buddha's own words must be rejected." ―Dalai Lama XIV

Scientists who are honest in the least with their information should be able to agree with and accept the following, because they hold entirely true.

"When things are in order, if the cause of the orderliness cannot be
deduced from the motion of the elements or from the composition of
matter, it is quite possibly a cause possessing a mind." ―Johannes
Kepler

"Things that look like they were designed,
probably were... If intelligence is an operative component of the
universe, a science that methodologically excludes its existence will be
susceptible to being trapped in an endless chase for materialistic
causes that do not exist... Where there are sufficient grounds for
inferring intelligent causation, based on evidence of "specified
complexity," it should be considered as a component of scientific
theories.
Inclusion of intelligent causation in the scientific
equation is not novel and has not impeded the practice of science in the
past, e.g. Newton and Kepler, in an age when science was not
constrained by a philosophical materialism, and by many current
scientists who have remained open to following the evidence where it
leads." ―Donald L. Ewert

"For God to prove
himself on demand, physically, would be a grave disappointment, and the
strongest Christians should be considerably grateful that he chooses not
to do so. The skeptic endlessly demands proof, yet God refuses to
insult the true intelligence of man, the '6th sense', the chief quality,
the acumen which distinguishes man from the rest of creation, faith." ―Criss Jami

"It
is debatable whether blind faith is truly faith at all. Faith is the
perceptive gray area where scientific facts meet an individual's
experiential truths - the extreme of the former is left feeling in the
dark whereas the latter is caught blinded by the light. By proper
scientific method, it is intellectually dishonest for me to declare the
existence of God with utmost certainty, but to my individual spirit, I
would be intellectually dishonest to deny the existence of God even for a
second. This leaves the best of both worlds, as the believer is called
to be able to give reasons for his faith, a deviation from mere
fantasy." ―Criss Jami

Recognizing Bad Science
“Science” claims that stalactites and petrification take “millions of years” to form/occur, yet modern-day observable evidence suggests otherwise. This can be tested and observed, ergo, it is scientific fact it takes less than “millions of years” to form/occur. As in the past, science is wrong yet again, but continues pressing the same erroneous disproven information.

"Science" shows us images of a dinosaur they call Deinocheirus in our textbooks, yet the only skeletal remains that have ever been retrieved have been two fore-limbs and some bits of vertebrae. In other words, their depictions of this so-called dinosaur are made up fiction (as with much of their other so-called "science"). Brontosaurus was a made up dinosaur, too. The skeletal remains did not consist of a head. Yet somehow it ended up with the skull of a Camarasaurus, which scientists refer to as a "mistake" rather than what it truly is—a deliberate falsification of the evidence. The body itself was that of an Apatosaurus. Let us be realistic here. The most complete skeleton of any dinosaur that has ever been discovered has been only 90% complete. If you are smart, that should inform you as to the fictional representations of most of the dinosaurs presented to us. As Palaeontologists admit, complete skeletons are rare—isolated bones and teeth are more common. A Tyrannosaurus Rex nicknamed "SUE" has been discovered to be 80% complete. Previous T. Rex skeletons were usually missing over half their bones. We now have about 15 good skeletons of T. Rex, including two that are
nearly complete. That is a lot compared to most dinosaurs, which consist of nothing more than a single tooth or bone. But we still do not have a complete
T. Rex.

Let us perform a bit of logical science. If we have never seen a human
being before, or a complete human skeleton, and we uncover three
vertebrae, two wrist bones, and four toes, it is impossible for us to construct anything legitimately looking the way it ought. If you have a handful of bones and you construct a complete image of a creature from that, you are not performing science—you are merely using your imagination and then inferring that it is somehow "science." Anything we construct based on those few bones alone is speculation, imagination, inference, and theory. It is not science!

With regard to the Tyrannosaurus Rex, we are told that as long as you stood still it could not see you; it could only see you if you moved. How do they know this? Did they find a T. Rex eyeball and test it? Did they stand in front of a living T. Rex and test this theory out? This is not science! This is speculation, imagination, inference, and theory. It cannot be tested or observed, therefore it is not science! How about when they tell us what a particular dinosaur's diet consisted of. Unless you found a well-preserved dinosaur and examined the contents of its stomach, you cannot know this for certain. In fact, even the contents of its stomach would not tell you what its actual diet consisted of. Those things could just be a part of its diet. The type of teeth it had does not determine whether it was a carnivore or a herbivore. Pandas have sharp teeth but only eat bamboo. Humans have flat teeth yet eat meat. There are so many animals that this theory does not apply to that you cannot use it with any degree of accuracy.

Much of the information we are told about dinosaurs is purely conjecture. All we can tell from fossils is that these animals once lived and are now dead. You do not know what its skin looked like. You do not know its behaviour. You do not know whether is was a loner or moved in packs. You do not know if it was intelligent or not. You do not know its entire diet. Unless you witness one face-to-face and see all these things, drawing these conclusions from a fossil is nothing more than conjecture, speculation, imagination, inference, and theory.

Do not misunderstand me. I love science—true and genuine science that follows the scientific method. If you cannot test it or observe it, it is not science! The only thing that goes "beyond science" is imagination, but imagination is not science. If your so-called "science" does not follow the scientific method, then all it is is conjecture, it is speculation, imagination, inference, and/or theory. You need to be able to perform repeated and repeatable tests and to observe the results of those tests in order for it to be science. Again, if you cannot test it or observe it, it is not science!

*I could include many more quotes in regard to what "science" and the "scientific method" are, all of which agree with everything I have already provided here, but doing so would be overkill. Certain individuals and so-called "scientists" (like Richard Dawkins) like to ignore and deny the definitions and practices of "science" and the "scientific method," claiming you can "go beyond" science. For the lay person, "go beyond" means substituting speculation, imagination, inference, and theory for real, true, and genuine science.